Thursday, July 19th, 2007

b real added a comment to my previous post, quoting Sy Hersh, that I thought I’d post here. It demonstrates once again how truth simply does not play a part in Bush/Cheney management. And the press continues to act as an oblivious enabler:

sy hersh on democracy now may 24th:…the thing that’s amazing about this government, the thing that’s really spectacular, is even now how they can get their way mostly with a lot of the American press. For example, I do know — and, you know, you have to take it on face value. If you’ve been reading me for a long time, you know a lot of the things I write are true or come out to be more or less true. I do know that within the last month, maybe four, four-and-a-half weeks ago, they made a decision that because of the totally dwindling support for the war in Iraq, we go back to the al-Qaeda card, and we start talking about al-Qaeda. And the next thing you know, right after that, Bush went to the Southern Command — this was a month ago — and talked, mentioned al-Qaeda twenty-seven times in his speech. He did so just the other day this week — al-Qaeda this, al-Qaeda that. All of a sudden, the poor Iraqi Sunnis, I mean, they can’t do anything without al-Qaeda. It’s only al-Qaeda that’s dropping the bombs and causing mayhem. It’s not the Sunni and Shia insurgents or militias. And this policy just gets picked up, although there’s absolutely no empirical basis. Most of the pros will tell you the foreign fighters are a couple percent, and then they’re sort of leaderless in the sense that there’s no overall direction of the various foreign fighters. You could call them al-Qaeda. You can also call them jihadists and Salafists that want to die fighting the Americans or the occupiers in Iraq and they come across the border. Whether this is — there’s no attempt to suggest there’s any significant coordination of these groups by bin Laden or anybody else, and the press just goes gaga. And so, they went gaga a little bit over the Syrian connection to the activities in Tripoli. It’s just amazing to me, you guys.b real

As I’m sure you’ve all heard by now, the Department of Defense issued a press release Wednesday touting its capture of one of the top leaders of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Khaled Abdul-Fattah Dawoud Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, also known as Abu Shahid. And in a stroke of sheer luck, interrogators were able to get him to confirm all of the Administration’s talking points about Al Qaeda’s involvement in Iraq just as the Democratic leadership in the Senate was moving to end a Republican filibuster of the Levin-Reed Troop Withdrawal plan.

From Maria Bartiromo’s interview of Condi Rice in the current issue of BusinessWeek:MB: Would you consider a position in business or on Wall Street?CR: I don’t know what I’ll do long-term. I’m a terrible long-term planner.